


Long Before Clow

by Syri



Category: Cardcaptor Sakura
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-27
Updated: 2015-08-27
Packaged: 2018-04-17 10:52:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4663866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Syri/pseuds/Syri
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clow gave them a physical body, a place in the material word. He gave them love, deep, unconditional and everlasting. But he did not create them; they existed long before Clow, and they would be here long after he passed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Long Before Clow

They had been together long before Clow Reed.

Clow welcomed them into the world with such love, such fervor, and such passion. Both of them, one year apart, had felt Clow Reeds skin, his hair, his breath, as their first physical sensations. Though exhausted from the unfathomable amount of magic he had poured into the world, they could feel the thrum of his power beneath his heated skin, crackling like electricity at Kero's birth, and whirling like white-capped water at Yue's. His two guardians had heard his welcoming words, full of adoration, at the same moments they heard his heartbeat, pressed against the magicians chest, and each heard his voice catch as tears began to well in his tired eyes. 

Yue had not been there for Kero's creation...not really, at least, not technically, but Kero had been at his Masters side when his younger brother, his twin, was brought into the world. He had told Yue in the weeks following, how many countless hours the sorcerer had poured into his making. Runes and lunar charts and spells in languages even a "word-genius" like Kerberos couldn't identify and, if the lion was to be believed, amazing amounts of liquor, which accounted for his little brothers weird coloring and impractical hair. Clow, he had said, wouldn't sleep for days at a time, and would sometimes growl and shout in English when something worked, or fall asleep on a desk soaked with frustrated tears.

Judging by the state of his journals about Kero's making, with its many red wine stains, they could only assume it had been the same way for him in 1708 as it was in 1709.

"My boys," Clow had whispered, clutching Yue's newborn, bare form to him, dragging Kero close to his side as well. "My boys, you're both here...you're here, you're both so beautiful, perfect..." he had rambled, still pushing away the intense dizziness of such a to-this-day unparalleled spell. "I've been planning for you for a century and now you're both here, my perfect twins."

They had enjoyed the sensation of being held, even though it overwhelmed them both, assaulting their new physical senses. All noises echoed too loudly, all touch set their skin on edge, light was so distracting as they tried to look at everything that moved or glimmered at once.

"Yes, it has to be hard for you," Clow had told them both in a hushed whisper, "to come from nothing so sharply into a physical body."

Kerberos said Yue's horrified, scandalized and offended expression had perfectly mirrored his own emotions when Clow had told him the same thing, even though he, as Yue, didn't fully understand the reasons for such a feeling. Not immediately. 

Yue couldn't be sure how it was for Kero, personally, emotionally, but both had been born in the same manner. Grown, physically fit, bodies far stronger than their makers, with coiling muscles made for pouncing and shredding, for sprinting and pulling back the tense strings of a bow with the ease of a tailor pulling a needle and thread. They were born with speech, with an understanding of the beautiful strings of English and Chinese words Clow poured out over them as he held them, love and disbelief spilling like a baptism for his newborn creatures. They were born able to walk, Kero with note immediate grace than Yue, and their first argument was over the apparent unfairness that Kero had been born with four legs while Yue had but two; all it took, however, was for Clow to gently point out that Yue had been given a body like Clow's, for the moon guardian to not only stop whining, but to begin to crow about his superior form.

Within a week, Clow had been bandaging gashes, scalds, and ice burns from fights between his Sun and Moon. 

Though the Guardians were born with speech, with intelligence, there was a great difference between knowledge and wisdom. Their knowledge allowed them to converse with their maker immediately, to ask questions, to know how to pick up a cup and savor the sweet, creamy liquid offered to them on their first day; sweet, frothy sun tea to celebrate Kero's birth, milk and mooncakes to celebrate Yue's. Knowledge taught them by instinct how to feed oneself, but it was Clow's taught wisdom where they learned to thank him for the gift, how to behave nicely at a table; it was their own stubborness that kept them from using said manners when in a fight over lunch. Knowledge let Yue know he didn't care for being covered in sticky honey from the spilled jar, but he needed Clow to show him how to heat a kettle and run water to keep himself clean. Kero's own instinct ingrained in him how a cat licks oneself and ones paws to wash, but not how to deal with his human soul.

They were, in a manner, both sharp adults and impulsive children, the intelligence of grown men and the temperament of schoolboys, with Kero's whining and Yue's almost volatile temper. Clow, though, took the task of half-raising his boys with tenderness, patience, and minimal screaming. He seemed to enjoy being their teacher, as he took what they already knew and made it physical, made it tangible, something that could understand. Yue knew, simply knew, that fire was hot and it would burn, that food was cooked over it, but he had no concept of what "burn" was until he touched the flames and howled for an hour afterwards. It was almost whiplash, to be reading A Midsummers Nights Dream to his boys in the evening and having them understand the prose perfects, even the gist of the social context, and just an hour after have Yue in a fit because he didn't yet have the patience to braid his own long hair for bed, but he dealt. With love, with patience, with bourbon, he dealt. 

Clow had hoped, as his boys mellowed and matured into their role as warriors, guardians and companions, that they would stop the constant half-serious attempts on one another life, that Yin and Yang would find their balance in one another, and not just their opposite. He was right, to a degree. Yue and Kero seemed to show no signs, at one year, at five, at fifteen, of ever giving up their celestial-level sibling rivalry, but they seemed to grow comfortable with one another. There was always love, since the start, that was true; Clow often found Yue as a newborn against Kero's broad side for a nap, the elder curled so protectively he growled in his sleep when Clow neared to pick him up and put him to bed. Even at his most temperamental and ghastly-behaved, Yue would slip Kero the scraps of sweet dough from his baking trials, the trimmings from his meals, obviously knowing the way to Kero's empty- bellied heart. All the same, this bond seemed to only increase as they aged and calmed down...however it did nothing to temper their fights. Every year they went through the same seasons, just as the earth did. Winter was for shoving Kero into snow banks, using his silver-white coloring to blend in, both ending up sodden, frozen, with the threat of soggy wings. Spring was for pushing one another out of trees, and summer, for attempted drownings. Through the magic atmosphere of autumn there was frightening Kero with ghost stories, and spattering Yue's hair with the innards of carved turnips, before the first snow of winter fell and Yue was again at his prime. 

He had hoped for his guardians to embody the beautiful symbolism of their magic; he just wished they could do so in less violent, property-damaging ways.

However, he loved to see it. His beautiful children, strong, ferocious, gentle, all in equal measure, as wise as they were impulsive, each in their own measure...and of course it wasn't as though he didn't join in, sometimes tag-teaming with Kero to knock the prideful angel down a few pegs, swimming around him beneath the surface of the water like sharks smelling blood, or conspiring with Kero that no no, go ahead, it'll grow back in a few weeks, you won't get in trouble I promise. At others, though, he would act as though he was playing one side, only to switch and find his camaraderie with Yue instead, using their knowledge of such witchcraft like geometry and thumbs to make more snowballs to fling at the Sun than Kero could effectively dodge. Their laughter rose up over the sound of his indignant howls, sounding all the world as though he were being caught, butchered, and served on a platter.

Clow would supply Kero with insults in foreign languages as often as he would Yue with hot chilies to dip into Kero's tea. He played both sides at home as often as he did in bed, Kero would often joke, causing a filthy retort from Clow and an indignant scoff from Yue. At first, at least, till the days when such filthy banter caused him to blush instead, to turn away and busy his hands, his attention. It had always been, being the more human of the two, Clow would hook Yue into his over the top theatrical teasing, but now he shied away from it. The sarcastic play-acting hurt too badly, resembled too closely what he really wanted...he instead turned to Kerberos for his company, rather than Clow, with his ability to make him stammer and blush for no reason. 

With the advent of their growing closeness and spirit-bound connection, came the unforeseen side effect; Clow now had two housemates who were just as likely to gang up on him as they were to fight one another. While Yue could often be counted on to praise and uplift his Master through his mistakes, even he seemed to have only so much tolerance for Clow Reeds more impulsive mistakes and practical jokes. He swore, those two seemed to almost be able to read one anothers thoughts, with how much ease they played off one another to banter insults at their maker, to scold him when he lit another room aflame while trying to control Fiery ("we TOLD YOU he doesn't like having to keep the study fire lit, the fireplace is too cramped!"). It only grew worse, really, once he and Yue broke their growing sexual tension and began a love affair. Oh how mistaken he was, thinking he would gain more peace along with a beloved, beautiful romantic partner, but oh no, having to deal with Clow's bullshit on a more intimate level instead gave Yue the confidence he needed to tell Clow exactly where he could stick his burnt dinner after coming back to the manor smelling of another mans cologne. Oh yes, he knew his master was not exclusively his, and he tolerated it with certain lovers, knowing somewhere that he was still special, but that hadn't stopped the pain and heartbreak, especially at first, and it hadn't stopped his Guardians from greeting him only with bared fangs and cold, icy stares. Becoming lovers, it seemed, no matter how deeply impassioned, no matter Yue tolerating the loveless flings he had with others, only gave them something new to bitch about, and Kero especially was never shy about threatening to rip out Clow's throat if he broke his brothers heart again, which he came very close to once in 1902 after a week-long stay with the Dimension witch turned out to be about as much pleasure a business. 

They were in love, and that was known. Yue knew he was something special to his Master, he knew the looks and tender kisses he gave Yue were not doled out to Mr William Cooper or Miss Rebecca Myrth or any of his other causal bed partners. He could handle Clow's lack of monogamy for many things...he just knew, in something deep within him, that those looks and tender kisses would be given to Yuuko Ichihara with all the sincerity and love that they were given to him. He could share Clow on a sexual level, a purely physical level, but knowing he shared him with her in matters of love and romance and passion, caused an ache he could never directly address. 

At the very least, no matter how deep his pain, knowing Clow was with another he loved as much as he, while Yue could never love anyone as he loved Clow...he wasn't alone. He had Kero. He had his brother, his twin, his complement. Kero let him sob and cry into his side, didn't stop him when he beat on walls and threw things. He didn't judge him out loud when he'd still wait for Clow to return, unable to be livid too long, when he melted into his arms and forgave him each time, when he claimed he understood that Clow loved two with the same ferocity that Yue loved one...even if Kero felt that their maker was kind of a douche in this regard, and should at least be honest about where he was spending his time once a decade, he kept it silent. There was love there, even if he didn't understand it. He would not criticize, but he would be there.

They were never alone. They had never been alone. They had one another long before Clow, and as they would find out someday, they had one another long after he was gone. For all their arguing and attempted homicide, for all of Kerberos's laziness and gluttony and Yue's obsessive, blinding love for Clow, they still held something between the two, the sun and the moon, that Clow Reed would never be privy to, something no argument over a riddle game or dinner party could break.

"You were born to my mind long before you were born to me," Clow often told them, words that made them feel cherished, no matter how angry or hurt they were. Clow wanted them, willed for them to exist, planned them...but he was wrong. 

They existed long before Clow Reed, and would exist long after he was gone, God forbid that impossible day ever dawn.

It was something the guardians would not be able to vocalize to someone not like them, and there was no one else truly as they were. The Cards could understand it to a degree, the elements especially, but they were crafted differently, more like constructs, no less sentient than Kero or Yue, but their spirits were far less human. They were more like sprites, fairies...they were similar to their Guardians, there brothers, overlapping their magical natures the same way Clow overlapped their human natures...but nothing was quite like them.

How could they have even begun to vocalize their instinctive repulsion when they were born, not at their bodies nor their creator, for those were beautiful and wonderful and to be blessed with a physical, conscious soul was beyond imagining, but at Clow's words? That they had somehow come from nothing? How could they even attempt to tell a human, already so wise and powerful, that he was wrong? To be sure, Clow Reed understood that his children were not just symbols. They didn't "stand for" or "represent" the moon and the sun; they were made from it, woven by sunlight, stitched together with the lunar tides, both into their own flesh and blood, and to one another. The moon glows only because of the sun, and the two work together to shape life on the earth; in the same way, Yue was made to shine by the light of the sun, made to orbit the pull of the earth, Kero made to both nurture and scorch Clow when needed; it could absolutely be no other way. You cannot take wheat and eggs and somehow expect to produce a goat. This was why Kerberos could only be so angry at Clow, for his brothers desire to be near him, for his dependency, for his weakness at the new moon and at the distance between he and Clow when their Master traveled. How else could Yue be made, but to be the moon, because that's what he WAS? It's what they had always been, long before Clow...

How to explain to their maker that they knew his name before he spoke it, because they had known him since the day of his birth? That Kero had kept dust motes in his light through the windows to entertain him, that Yue had cradled him at night through the same glass? How to tell Clow that the reason they had such good judges of character for people wasn't because they were magical, but because they were natural? They had met every person who had ever lived before 1708 and 1709, because they had visited and surrounded each. 

It was not a conscious knowledge, no...they did not have memories, per se, of Clow. Neither could picture what he looked like as a boy, name anything he had done, share any stories of his childhood, because they were not present as conscious beings, they were not deities watching over the world...they simply were the world. 

"Humans are made of the same things we are you know," Kero had said once, after having an intensely strong connection to a very old witch. Yue had nodded, feeling it in a far lesser degree but knowing the magical tingling Kero had described.

"They are, but they're not aware of it. It's like telling a non magical person that there are ghosts nearby; it wouldn't effect them, except to know it. They would never feel it," he said, almost a little sadly.

As it turned out, the witch was a sun-worshipper, and would have been intimately entwined with the flames and heat and life of day, for centuries by then.

Yue and Kerberos had senses of places they had never walked upon, like a constant, vague sense of deja-vu, of walking back into a room one hadn't been in since they were a child, too little to form solid memories, recalled only by scent or spirit. In this way, they knew they were old. Kerberos the older, of course, it could be no other way, but Yue as ancient in context, compared to the mortal lives around them. They had been around before humans, before most animals, Kero, before all life...they had no senses of this, save for a mystical one. They just knew, in the same way that one knows there name despite not remembering being given that name, that they had met these en and women before. Since the world began, they were together, always in cycle and never apart, not for one moment.

It was the sun, Kero's light, that heated the sands of desserts so brutally that little could grow and thrive, turning the air into a shimmer from the sunlight on glass-like ground; and it was Yue who, upon night, soothed the earth, kissed away the burns and drew out the life that hid far beneath the ground. They knew they had both lay their light upon the shores of beaches on continents they would never visit in the flesh. Their squabbles and fights had been carried out for millenia over the poles, fighting for months at a time stubbornly for control over the sky, bringing months of darkness or a never-setting sun.

How could Clow possibly understand if they tried to tell him that they were ancient, primordial, knowing everything but remembering nothing?

Energy. magic. It has no eyes to see, nor a body to feel, no fingers to hold or a mouth to taste. it just is, and it reacts, and it changes, but it is never created, never destroyed. 

Was there any way Yue could tell even his lover, as they lay entangled skin to skin, panting, touching, unable to feel one another close enough, that he, too, had been intimate with another, in his own way? That his light had kissed the top of each ripple of water in every pond, every ocean, that wind had breezed through his moonlight, carrying him even into shadows? That long before Clow was even a thought, he had existed, guarded in the daytime sky by his older brother, faint in comparison to his light, only to seek his cosmic revenge by a total eclipse, keeping the sun from the earth?. How could he explain the energy he felt at a moon festival, the people of the city all gathered for food, for song, telling stories of Chang'e and the rabbit on the moon, without sounding conceited, without Clow misunderstanding and thinking Yue was claiming it was he being worshiped, and not simply the light he was made from?

They couldn't. They didn't have the words. Between the 4 languages they spoke, they had no way of expressing this, not tho their maker, not to any other human. It was a connection they shared, a secret only between them, between brothers.

As was their nature, the nature of the world, Clow passed, they mourned, Yue far harder and deeper than Kerberos, but they continued on. They existed long before Clow. They would survive long after his passing.

They didn't know people who passed them anymore. There were very few, only old magicians, who had been born before the dawn of the 18th century. But the lands, they knew still, no matter what building were erected, no matter who lived there, they were drawn to the familiar pulse of life they had once set into motion. The waters still churned from tides started by him hundreds of thousands of years ago. Plants continued in a constant life cycle fed by the sun, begun by the first spark of life that Kerberos was a part of. In the sky, still, the moon could often be seen, small and diminutive beside the more powerful sun, and still the moon cycled, reflected the suns rays, grew strong, grew weak, and then strong again.

Still they were, in turn, mighty and beautiful in equal measure.

They took a new master, a small Mistress. They watched her grow beneath the nurturing of the sun and the cradle of the moon, as they sheltered her in their own arms. 

Once, as their mistress slept, a beautiful, blossoming young woman of 17, the pair sat in each others company on the grass outside, still warm from the sun, cooling in the light of the moon, always together, as Kerberos asked,

"Yue? What do you think will happen, if we die?"

Yue let out a puff of air derisively. "Such a morbid subject after a beautiful day, brother?" Yue quipped, his voice now, after so many years tainted by sadness, by mourning, becoming alight with his former self. The moon cycling from the darkness of new to the beautiful, bright full. Everything in rhythm, everything in season, his beloved little brother as true to his nature as always. "...We won't die. Not like men do," he said with certainty.

"How do you know?" Kero wanted to know, his small form cuddled on Yue's shoulder, fuzzy little face pressed against Yue's pale cheek.

"Because, we can't die. not like men do," he repeated. "We'll just be unknotted, and go back to how we were before...before Clow."

He felt his tiny puffball brother nod. "With Sakura getting older...I can't help but worry sometimes..." he began, and Yue nodded quietly. Their Mistress, young and vibrant and full of life, would not live forever. That delusion had passed away with Clow. It wouldn't be for a very long time, they knew, and the notion of envisioning their beloved mistress as anything but young, vivacious and full of life was a thought too horrid to keep in their minds, but it would one day happen. It had embittered Yue so much, knowing he would again he tossed to the fates, left for another...but sitting aside his brother, a moon overhead in a bright, growing crescent, it was hard to not feel loved all the same, hard to not tell himself he would be cared for, in 100, 400, 1,000 years...besides, he wouldn't be alone for it. They had always been together.

"We'll just be light again, won't we..." Kerberos pondered, letting out a deep breath. Not a sigh, not a murmur of sadness, only reality, something he knew...perhaps this was how Yue felt, then, when he contemplated his own nature, his dependence on his master, his sickness without it. A knot of pain, of wondering why, but only a little, diluted in the simple peace of knowing this was just how they were made. By Clow, by the universe, by design, by chance. 

"Yeah...that's the afterlife, isn't it? To become one again, with where we came from? I...I don't think we're made of the right thing, to be reborn..." he said with a bit of doubt, but not enough to shake his opinions.

Kero was quiet a long moment, listening to the late summer locusts chirping a storm in the nearby bushes.

"Wouldn't you wanna be though, Yue?" he wanted to know. "When people get redid, its always with the same people...we'd probably be born to Clow again, or maybe you'd be with him."

Yue side-eyed his brother, his pale lips twitching into an almost-smile.

"Kerberos, if that were the case, what if I was reborn as a woman? I may well be your mother." And he laughed as Kero fell from midair as though struck with a slingshot; a light laughter, singing, melodic, and true; it had taken far too long to hear that again.

"Ew! Don't ever say that! Besides, you'd make a terrible mom!"

"Excuse you, I think I've done a decent job helping to raise Sakura into a fine young lady!" he argued with mock indignation. Well. Mostly mock.

Kero pulled himself from the ground, dusted the dirt from his coat ("now I'm going to need a bath!") and simply glowered up with his adorable beady eyes and said, "Her 14th birthday, Tomoyo was running late, and you singed off 6 inches of her hair with a curling iron."

"How was I to know those things got so hot?!" he argued back, his angered voice still reverberating with laughter like a bell long since struck. "Besides, I cut it nicely to even it out and she looked lovely!"

"Yeah, and she also learned how to swear in English that day thanks to you!"

"I'm sorry, from me? I believe it was YOU who called me an incompetent bitch that morning!"

"After a solid 2 minutes of fuck, damnit, and shit from you. Did you SEE Onii-chans face? Here he only knew you as this demure, uptight proper thing, I don't think he even knew you COULD swear!"

"He never heard me stab into Clow then!" he sneered with a warm spark in his eye.

...Kero still couldn't believe they had spent so much time apart, Yue hurting, in so much pain, behind that glass wall he had built.

Kero's tone grew quiet again, though less mournful than his initial question as he gently asked, "Well...wouldn't you though? Want to be reborn, with Clow?"

The wind was sweet that night, carrying the first scents of marigolds from gardens, and the last of the petunias. Autumn was on its way, Yue's seasons taking over Kerberos's, overlapping, contrasting, always together.

"...Yes," he breathed softly. "Yes, Gods, of course I would...I still miss him so much, Kero-chan," he said softly, using his pet name. "But we'll be with him again, you know."

"...Humans are the same as we are," Kero nodded, repeating a long forgotten conversation, one buried in centuries of dust and pain and sweet, beautiful memories. "They say it like its something cute, like, 'we all come from the stars,' but they don't realize what it means, really." And Yue, again, nodded quietly.

"They are, they just don't know it...Cept for maybe Clow. Someday, when humans are gone, and their cycles of birth have all finished, they'll return to what they were in the beginning. If we die before then, we'll simply be like we were back then. And we'll be waiting for him...for Sakura, for whoever comes after her...but first, for him. I'll be with him again someday..."

"And if we don't, if we're around that long, he'll be there waiting for us right? Wit that stupid smile and those stupid glasses. He'll tease us for taking so long..."

"Thats right," Yue said in a barely audible whisper, eyes still skyward, aura still quit.

Kero fluttered back to take his seat on Yue's shoulder.

"...Well, till then, you're just stuck with me, k, brat?"

They were together long before Clow Reed, and would be long after he was gone.


End file.
